The Final insult to all those boyhood dreams

THE programme for the first Wembley Final, in 1923, noted with due pride that the new Empire Stadium was so vast that it occupied exactly the same acreage as the Biblical city of Jericho.

Well, the walls don't come tumbling down for another six months or so but on Saturday afternoon, Chelsea and Aston Villa kicked a hole as big as a house through all our fond memories of the grandmother of all football grounds.

The old lady has provided a home for great FA Cup Finals - like the one which enshrined Sir Stanley Matthews in the legend of the English game - as well as for the good, the bad and the ugly Finals which have filled the intervening years.

But never, in living recollection, has there been so awful a first half as that which heralded the beginning of the end for the twin-towered Camelot of our boyhood dreams.

The second half was better, although not by much and only because it would have been impossible for it to be any worse.

Chelsea and Villa - these spitting, snarling, spoiling symbols of English football as it enters a new millennium - hissed goodbye to all our yesterdays.

Not a solitary chance worthy of the name in those first 45 minutes of muscle over mind. Not a single shot of substance anywhere near the Chelsea goal in Villa's entire hour and a half upon that hallowed stage.

Not that either club's gathering of committed supporters seemed to notice, let alone care, that their cardboard heroes were trampling on our nostalgia.

So tribal has the national game become in all its New Labour trendiness that no matter how unpalatable the fare, the fans swallow it whole.

Villa sang their hearts out for the lads in defeat even though the lads had set out their miserable stall merely to avoid losing - and failed - while doing precious little to win.

Chelsea rejoiced as if they had cut a swathe of brilliance through the history of football and no doubt felt hard done by yesterday when it rained on their parade. What they forget is that the gods of the game are impartial and hold them to an altogether loftier standard.

By the base judgment of two moderate teams separated on the day only by their differing levels of mediocrity, Chelsea did deserve to win.

They played the only 10 minutes of football worth watching, not that such a brief span so early after the interval represented remotely adequate return on admission prices rising through Pounds 135 a ticket.

While John Gregory, with less natural talent at his disposal, sat mostly in the stand with his mobile telephone to his ear instructing his bench-men to maintain the grim status quo, Gianluca Vialli partially unlocked the most stagnant of stalemates by adjusting the role of his gifted fellow Italian Gianfranco Zola.

So although justice may not have enjoyed its finest hour and a half it was served in the 73rd minute, after a fashion.

That the only, lonely goal should be scored by a foreigner on his last legs at Chelsea from a butter-fingered assist by Villa's custodian of English heritage was entirely in keeping with a Final which time will forget ... if not with a date for history to remember Roberto Di-Linguine Matteo's gratitude to David Calamity James will last longer than the schmaltzy images of Chelsea's footballing dads hauling their kids with them up those ancient steps to receive the Cup.

Perhaps they got swept away on the gushing sentiment of a day when the Prime Minister's wife gave birth.

But while some wept with emotion, others did so for the lost traditions of a manly game.

Either way, the sight of Dennis Wise holding his infant in one hand and the old tin pot in the other was a far cry from the stately manner in which England's captain took delivery of the World Cup here in 1966. Where Bobby Moore famously scraped the mud of battle against the Germans from his palms before shaking hands with the Queen, the cup-winning footballers of today wipe their nappies on the velvet parapet of the Royal Box.

Nor was this a match suitable for younger viewers, not with the aforementioned Mr Wise at its festering core. Having been rightly booked once already, the Chelsea skipper was fortunate that a second scything of George Boateng - late and from behind, naturally - escaped the referee's notice.

With the headstrong Wise and the impetuous Paul Scholes in Kevin Keegan's midfield, England will be lucky to finish one match in Euro 2000 with 11 men.

Until Chelsea scored, thereby lifting the threat of extra time, many neutral observers were wishing that Wembley's last FA Cup match had never started.

By the conclusion of the first half some were suggesting that they cut straight to penalties.

Personally, I favoured consigning both teams to the InterToto Cup, since neither of them deserved a summer holiday.

But, in the end, there was a semblance of symmetry to the occasion. The first FA Cup at Wembley was lost by a team wearing claret-and-blue, West Ham being beaten by Bolton Wanderers in what was considered by many at the time to have been a disappointing Final.

Seventy-seven years on, as Chelsea lowered the curtain on Villa and the Empire Stadium, came the Final insult.